Solution 3
This involves editing the savegame directly and it may irretrievably corrupt the file if you don't pay close attention! Only choose this approach if the above solutions have failed.
1. Assign your ship a unique name and save the game. This name may be nonsensical.
2. Go to the game's save directory, i.e. C:\Users\<User name>\Documents\Egosoft\X4\save.
3. Find the savegame file where the issue occurs and create a backup.
4. Unpack the file using e.g. 7zip. This should give you a plain XML file.
5. Open the XML file using a text editor. I recomment Notepad++ over the standard Windows Notepad as it allows you to keep a complete history of your changes and you can easily revert any of them by using Ctrl+Z.
6. Find your ship's name using the search function (Ctrl+F) and grab your favourite drink as the savegame file will be huge and it will take some time to find any results. Do not close the program if it seems unresponsive. The search should give you a component XML tag which should look something like this:
Code: Select all
<component ... name=(your ship's name) ... >
...
7. Scroll down until you find a section that starts with <orders ...>. Make sure to not scroll past the closing tag </component ...> as this would lead to editing the wrong dataset.
8. Find a tag that says <order ... state="critical"> and delete anything from <order ... state="critical"> to the corresponding </order> tag. Do not delete the surrounding <orders> and </orders> tag.
9. Repeat steps 6-8 for any other ships that are stuck.
10. Save the file and compress it to .gz using e.g. 7zip (use format gzip).
11. See if the game properly loads and if the ships are no longer stuck. If not, start over from step5 using your backup.
12. Delete the backup created in step 3.